Foreign News: The Impostor

Two weeks ago 79-year-old Speaker Edouard Herriot heaved himself up from
his chair overlooking France's Assembly to announce that one of its
members, Jacques Ducreux, 41, had been killed in an auto smashup. At
once the other deputies stood up, according to custom, to wait for the
expected eulogy. They knew this one would probably take time: after
all, Monsieur Ducreux was a member of the executive committee of
Herriot's own Radical Socialist Party. Herriot started off in style: he
limned the pastoral beauties of the Vosges countryside where Ducreux
came from, and recalled its people's heroism during the Franco-Prussian
War....